The day after Mothers’ Day, May 14, 1961, the front-page picture of a Greyhound bus engulfed in flames galvanized the American public. It was Anniston, Alabama, and Klansmen had fully intended to burn the freedom riders alive. For the first time many Americans realized the full depth of hatred faced by black southerners—and those who came to help them.
Right now two videos may be having a similar effect. They show shockingly savage attacks on students by the police; at Berkeley, we see protesting students with linked arms being jabbed and beaten by police “batons” (as poet laureate Robert Hass pointed out, this is not an orchestra and those are not batons—they’re clubs). At Davis it’s a line of seated, peaceful students being casually doused with pepper spray by an apparently impassive police officer.
If the salutary shock of this confrontation were to wake up the public as the photo of the burning bus succeeded in doing in 1961, what might they learn? I think, three things.
1. This is just the surface of a much bigger problem. As I write, the U.S. Senate is getting ready to debate, and hopefully reject, S. 1867, the National Defense Authorization Act, which would give all future Presidents the right to do what President Obama has already done: to assassinate American citizens without trial, anywhere—including on American soil. This bill, which was drafted in secret by Sens. Carl Levin (D-Mich.) and John McCain (R-Ariz.) and passed in a closed-door committee meeting, without even a single hearing, is only the latest step in the noose of militarization that has been tightening around our freedoms (or our very lives) since 9/11. In an article entitled “SWAT Teams, Flash-Bang Grenades, Shooting the Family Pet: The Shocking Outcomes of Police Militarization in the War on Drugs” that appeared on Alternet recently it was pointed out that there are more than 50,000 police paramilitary raids in the US each year—more than 130 every day, mostly for prosecution of drug warrants. The first lesson an awakened public should draw from the scenes at Berkeley and Davis is really that there’s no such thing as “appropriate” violence that can be contained in a corner and not spill out where we don’t want it—or more accurately, where we are forced to recognize what it really is.
2. And the next lesson is similar to the first, for an illusion has been spun around the wonder-weapons of modern warfare: pilotless drones. In a highly significant disclosure by the Fellowship of Reconciliation, drones, designed to allow us to kill “others” without endangering ourselves, are already in use for border surveillance, and from there the next step has already been taken: a Texas Police Department recently acquired a drone with taser capability. Others have submitted their requests across the country. Violence that we hurl at others—and make no mistake, the cowardly aspect of drones means that they are a form of violence, possibly one of the worst, in Gandhi’s view—comes back. As the Buddha said, to hate another is to throw sand up in the air: it must come back upon the thrower.
But not all the lessons of the photos are negative. One is downright inspiring.
3. When I heard from Mica and Hayden, two of our Metta volunteers, how they and the other students stood up to shockingly brutal treatment without retaliating, I immediately thought of that highpoint of modern nonviolence, the “raid” on the Dharsana salt pans in Gujarat, India on May 21, 1930. That event, where Satyagrahis walked resolutely into certain beatings for hours together without retaliating, marked the end of British control in India—arguably the end of colonialism in its classic, overt form.
Since then an even more dramatic scene has unfolded at Davis, where a large group of students were on the verge of a violent confrontation with a smaller (doubtless frightened) line of police. The police were menacing the students with shotguns armed with another sub-lethal type of ammunition, when one of them shouted “mic check” and proceeded to have them all in unison say to the police that they were giving them “a moment of peace” in which to leave. And the police left!
So far, the students say they are using nonviolence (or at least that’s what’s reported in the press) because it gives them “the moral high ground.” In other words, it’s a winning strategy. If—no, when—they take the next step and realize that nonviolence is the only force that rehumanizes as it works, that can permanently reverse militarism and not just give it another form, I believe nothing will be able to stop them.
The freedom riders delegitimated racism; perhaps this generation, with their creativity and their courage, will delegitimate violence itself.
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By: Metta Center
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The problem is that the nonviolence that is used may be all too tactical. The famous, dramatic, and when viewed in a smaller frame of reference “stare down” in condemning silence of chancellor Katehi appears to be a powerful moment in and of nonviolence. Yet this action and unfolding of meaning bears within itself a crisis for nonviolence. And nonviolence is in crisis and has been for a long time, in American activism at least. Your own expression of sympathy for the frightened police already are the words of a “traitor”, in that you are not towing the line of vilification and condemnation that lies seething, yes seething, beneath the surface of the tactical front lines of skirmish and ostensible nonviolence employed in most protests.
With some exceptions, like chants to the police that protesters want them to be paid better (which elicited smiles from the police), the “nonviolence” that operates is in a crisis for those who have the eyes to see this. The “stare down”, tied powerfully in with the calls for Katehi’s resignation, is absolutely rich with virtually every element of what might be called a “bad” nonviolence, one that is corrupted throughout with the great and grave error that permeates the predominant understanding of nonviolence. In microcosm, such a staredown bespeaks threat of every kind *but* physical violence. When asked if she feared the students at that moment, Katehi replied “no”. Yet the staredown constitutes a threat. It says: “we will not speak to you, you did wrong, we do not seek dialogue, our silence represents and instantiates our power, individually and as a group, even in consensus (which steamrollers dissent, permit me to note) to enact sanctions on you as a person and as a leader; furthermore, we seek to hold you personally responsible, even as we vaunt the questioning of the too-high role of leaders as such, and wish to make you, as a figurehead, personally responsible in the manner we actually do not think should otherwise be applied to leaders as such, because it is now expedient. We are showing you that we can starve you. We are not seeking to enjoin you to join us: we want you removed. We do not seek to implement solutions, nor do we want to hear any sort of pleading of your case; we are pronouncing you guilty, simpliciter. We are now seizing the movement and the action that has taken place. We shall deprive that action of the disclosure that only dialogue and language can enable, forcing only that which fits into the context of this, our unremitting, controlled gaze, in an imposed arena of understanding we control in this, our concerted effort. We shall make the utmost use of the idea of nonviolence by not lifting a finger to harm you. We shall impose sanctions on you without physically attacking you. We don’t want to hear about anything. We waited. We pushed, we organized, we shouted, we even created some mayhem, but carefully placed within this our Good Nonviolence of locking arms and, having found a breakdown of some kind, we are now going to capitalize on that to the fullest possible hilt. We stare with every possible effort of understanding to hold you as personally responsible as is possible and as can be augmented by this stone cold silence of disdain and quiet horror. We will push this to the utter limit. We will coordinate our behaviors, and none shall speak out or disturb our consensus, none shall break the silence or speak out to you. None shall seek to establish a space for dialogue. We will seek only your complete removal as the one and only, total solution. If this causes you harm or if it harms a broader truth of your overall competence, if the situation is mitigated by its extraordinary circumstance, in the words of Madeline Albright speaking of the sanctions on Iraq, ‘The price is worth it’. For this, our action and commitment here, is a kind of sanction we are placing on you. We shall reserve for our inner Power of negation a sanctity due to its person subjectivity, as if any and all such negation is never itself a potential violence or destructive force. This is what nonviolence looks like. There is nothing more to say and we deeply want to keep it that way, and will put absolutely everything into driving that home. You may look forward to nothing but our calls for your removal. There will be no support for examination of circumstances and your competing responsibilities concerning campus safety or reliance on different professional agencies and their independent responsibility. We seek your head, so to speak, and want it on a platter. If we can’t get it fully, we shall recreate this platter in our concerted, organized silence and nonviolent noncooperation.”
I rather imagine a Gandhian approach would be much more a gesture of prayer and invitation, an enjoining and a leading to a willingness to dialogue with Katehi.
The status of nonviolence is decided in this action far more than many may realize. The culture of rage, and the rich, capitalized and moneyed rage of rage and retribution and vengeance filled musics operating in that silence is the radical degradation of a deeper nonviolence. It is due to this rich culture, which I call the Other Wall Street because that’s what it is is the single most important thing in the world today. All cooptions of nonviolence that have funneled energy and thought into this culture of rage and capitalization on the superficial appearance of nonviolnece and its mastery have contributed variously to the tolerance for the all-but-forgotten sanctions, the massive, burgeoning, bloated penal system to which the occupiers quite unreflectively wish to refer Wall Street bandits, and the hidden source of greed as the supplanting of human need with the false food of revenge fantasies, that other aspect of culture that is not, it must be pointed out quite clearly, adequately understood in the usual condemnation of “materialism”. Indeed, it is the much too prevalent indictment of materialism that continues to occlude this rich culture of revenge, which itself is not in fact a materialism at all, but which is not, for all of that, any less wrong or any less powerful; it is all the more powerful the more we cite materialism as the single major problem. No, this culture is spiritual. For violence itself is spiritual through and through.